RIPOUT is a co-op roguelike shooter set in a horrible future of bio-engineered monsters and debatably pettable firearms. Even though RIPOUT entered Early Access today, I got the opportunity to play the game a bit early. While there are certainly a few things I’d like to see changed and improvements to be made, I’d say RIPOUT is built on a strong foundation and has plenty of room to grow into a truly spectacular game.
The setting of RIPOUT sees (or at least, saw) the world uniting together to fight a war against alien forces. In a desperate bid to win a war that was clearly not going in their favor, the corporations and governments of Earth developed a bio-engineered weapon called the Cell, which allowed body parts to rapidly regenerate and keep soldiers in the fight for longer. Unfortunately and predictably, the Cell turns on its creators and creates a zombie-like plague of mutated flesh masses that interrupts the war and forces humanity to flee to sanctuary in space.
You wake up in 2087, hilariously revealing that this universe where space-faring humanity has already fought and lost an alien war and doomed itself with a zombie virus is only about 60 years into our current future. As the last of the bioengineered soldiers, your job is to find out where this sanctuary is and burn out any Cell along the way.
This objective translates into gameplay by seeing you travel to multiple sectors in space, chasing the clues left by humanity in each. Each sector requires you to finish a certain amount of missions, each one taking place on a randomly generated map. The missions take five to 10 minutes to complete if you really wanted to you could go through a whole campaign in an afternoon, especially if you have friends with you.
Admittedly, most of the time I spent on missions was me trying to navigate the level to my next objective. The waypoint system isn’t the best I’ve ever seen and the dark levels can be easy to get lost in.
These levels are pretty to look at, though they moment feel kind of repetitive. This is understandable, considering it’s all randomly generated. The visual aesthetic uses a lot of blues and greens, oranges and yellows – which looks fantastic – but I don’t think really goes for the horror vibe the game is trying to have. Besides a few clumps of fleshy mounds, I don’t believe that a horrible flesh mutation has taken over these space stations and left them abandoned.
While I’d never tell the developers to be derivative, I’d point to the Dead Space series which I think does the feeling of what the game is going for a little better. A little more flesh, more rust and rot, and shades of red, brown, and muted yellow I think would do the game’s feeling of a fleshy apocalypse a lot more justice.
A good sense of atmosphere is also something these levels sorely lack at the moment. Every level is really quiet and I found myself sort of droning out navigating them. There isn’t a sense of tension, mystery, or really much of anything at the moment, outside of fights which does build up the tension. I really hope the developers work on this ASAP because it could be one of the biggest dealbreakers for the game come full release.
You battle your way through these levels with two main tools. Your pet gun, which is a weird centipede that spits bullets and loves you unconditionally, and mutant abominations of flesh and technology called critters.
Your pet gun is self-explanatory and is your best friend. It operates as a number of different firearms, depending on what you’ve crafted on your hub ship and selected before a level. Assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, it does it all—and more, because it also has the ability to jump and take a bite out of enemies, stunning and often one-shotting many of them. This is also how you acquire your secondary weapons, critters.
Critters are the aforementioned mutated limbs mixed with technology. They’re basically weapons that skitter around and fire at you if you’re in their line of sight. I used the words limbs to describe them because they can be attached to you via your pet gun catching them, fusing to your shoulder, and giving you access to whatever that critter happens to do. If you don’t kill or capture them yourself, they will run along and do the same to enemies in the level, drastically increasing their threat level.
My favorite critter is the claw; I’ve always wanted extra arms.
What the game desperately needs for its gameplay is some movement mechanics. You will die fast if you take too many hits, but without any means of dodging and limited sprinting, your options are basically to shoot something to death before it gets to you. The limited sprinting is especially annoying when the game needs you to run and escape the level in an allocated amount of time, with the map already a bit confusing to navigate and your character slowing to a halt every few seconds.
I certainly didn’t feel like a bio-engineered super soldier. The game needs some sliding, dodging, free sprinting, and for the love of all things fun, no fall damage. Otherwise, it really feels like my pet gun is doing all the work and I’m just here to shoot it.
All that being said, RIPOUT is still in early access and has plenty of room and time to address these issues. In case the devs end up reading this preview, here’s a list of must-have changes I think the game could really use before leaving early access:
- Add some movement mechanics. even if limited. It would help navigate the level and add some excitement to the supposed super-soldier we’re playing.
- Improve the waypoint system, somehow. I’m not an expert in this field but navigating levels is a bit of a pain as-is.
- Make critters last way longer than they do, or up their spawn rate significantly. They are by far the most fun weapons to use.
- Add menu navigation to the hub ship. Walking around is immersive but I want to be able to access everything quickly, especially in a prolonged campaign.
- Make the missions last longer with more enemies to kill. Rather than completing four or five fetch objectives in a short period of time, make the levels more linear, longer to navigate, and packed with more enemies to take down.
But those are just my suggestions.
